Alfonso Cuarón makes it very hard for a moviegoer to blink. In films as diverse as his bittersweet sex comedy Y Tu Mamá También, his underappreciated children’s film A Little Princess, and the blockbuster Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—the one film in the series most likely to entertain those who aren’t already Potter fans—the Mexican-born director delights in the gradual unfolding of moments that give equal weight to characters and their surroundings. The amount of sensual detail, peripheral business and background observation in his films makes them unusually rewarding a second time around. Cuaron’s latest feature, Children of Men, is his most immersive and absorbing film yet: a science fiction film set in 2027 London, after an unspecified catastrophe has left women infertile and started a countdown toward man’s extinction. Starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine and adapted from the P.D. James novel, it’s a chilling future-is-now vision often staged in lengthy unbroken takes that don’t cut away from the unwinding nightmare. Two sequences in particular—a mob attack and an extended foot chase through an urban battleground—are astonishing as both dynamic action filmmaking and art cinema. During a recent promotional stop in Atlanta, Cuarón talked by phone with Scene writer Jim Ridley about the movie’s style, its logistical hazards and the current events that seep into his futuristic dystopia. A hearty conversationalist and enthusiastic cinephile, he graciously extended a 10-minute phoner into more than half an hour of discussion and mutual movie geekery. (And the offer stands: come to Nashville!) Scene: Almost everyone who’s written about Children of Men has talked about your use of long, unbroken takes, either pro or con. Why use long single takes—why not just cut? Alfonso Cuarón: It’s the point of departure for the film. When we discussed the film, especially with Emmanuel Lubezki, the cinematographer, we discussed that even if the [subject matter] was going to be weightier than Y Tu Mamá También, the approach would have to be the same. That means that we would give a balance between character and social environment. In order to do that, you don’t do close-ups, because then you will be favoring character. So we tried to stay wide and loose, allowing not only the character to blend with the social environment, but ideally to create a tension between the character and social environment. The other rule we had in Y Tu Mamá was that we were not going to use editing and montage simply for an effect. We would try to create a moment of truthfulness in which the camera would be there just to register that moment of truthfulness. So that’s the principle behind these long shots. But as Chivo—we call Emmanuel Lubezki “Chivo”—as Chivo would say, “This is not an Olympics of long takes.” (laughs) The take itself will break the moment of truthfulness because you became so aware of the shot. Scene: How do you keep that from happening? Cuarón: First, you have to trust that you’re creating a moment, so the focus is on the moment and the beats you want to achieve. And then the camera should be just registering that. As long as there’s honesty in front [of the camera], I don’t think that you become so aware. Scene: Is that something only critics tend to notice? Cuarón: Of course, for all the movie geeks, yeah! (laughs) But from the standpoint of audiences, I don’t think they’re really that aware. Subconsciously, though, I think something is telling them there is not the safety net of editing—that you’re not hiding behind tricks. There’s a sense of reality behind it. The most important thing, and the thing I enjoy the most when I do these takes, is not so much the technical aspect of it but the conception of real time—in which you’re not manipulating time, time is exactly the time that you’re witnessing. Here, you have just the constant flow of a moment. I believe heartbeats get connected in that moment.Scene: Although the movie is set 20 years in the future, so many of the visual references are straight out of 2006 newspapers and news footage. Why did you place such emphasis on the present? Cuarón: Our intention was not to do a film about the future, a science-fiction thing. We’re trying to do a film about the present. We’re trying to take this adventure through the state of things and leave it to the audience to decide if there is hope. We have to honor the conventions of the story and indicate a couple of aspects that would sell the idea that we’re in the future. But everything else, pretty much, is the present. Actually, the visual references are mostly from media, of stuff that’s been happening the past few years. What we were trying to do, as much as possible, was not alienate that sense of the present. Emotionally, you’re watching something that’s happening in the moment, that’s happening today. Scene: It’s funny: the science fiction movies that seem freshest years later are the ones that are the most physically tactile, like Blade Runner, or grittily low-tech, like Alphaville. Cuarón: I haven’t seen Blade Runner in a while. Blade Runner is one of my favorite—well, anybody who loves the cinema, that’s one of your favorite movies of all. But from the beginning I remember talking to the art department and saying, “This is the anti-Blade Runner.” (laughs) The problem was, when I started working with the art department, they would send me these amazing designs of futuristic cars and high-tech buildings and gadgets. And I was excited to see all of that stuff, but then I said, “OK, guys, thank you, but that’s not the film, the film I’m going to do is this.” And I’d bring my own file of photographs I’d been putting together through all the years I’d been developing the project. There were photographs from Palestine, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Balkans, Chernobyl. I said, “No, this is the movie we’re making.” The constant mantra was, “We’re not creating; we’re referencing here.” Everything has to have a reference to the state of our times. Scene: Speaking of which, the fear of immigrants is a background motif throughout Children of Men. As a Mexican native here in the States, do you find the current anti-immigrant rhetoric disturbing? Scene: Speaking of which, the fear of immigrants is a background motif throughout Children of Men. As a Mexican native here in the States, do you find the current anti-immigrant rhetoric disturbing? Cuarón: Of course! And the sad thing is that it’s not even in the U.S.; the migratory issue has been going on around the world. And it’s something that will become more acute in the years to come, and even more acute with global warming. What’s really disturbing is how the immigration issue is being used for political purposes: it’s being used to manipulate people and instill fear in people about something that historically, at least in developed countries, the U.S. and Europe, economies have been benefited by immigrants. This whole idea of setting a big wall between Mexico and the U.S.—I just don’t get it. The same country that prides itself on tearing apart the Berlin Wall is now setting a new wall with Mexico? And it’s been proven that walls don’t work. What is going to happen is they are going to make it a little bit more difficult. And what happens when it’s a little bit more difficult? Instead of the mobility that has historically been between immigrants coming from Mexico to America, doing work and going back to their country once they get some money, now they know it’s so hard to get back and forth that they’re going to bring the whole family. In a way, they are just creating more immigration into the country. Scene: How does this tie into Children of Men? Cuarón: It’s about fear. I don’t agree when people simplify and say, “Iraq is the new Vietnam,” because the causes and the historical conflicts are completely different. The motivations and the justifications are completely different, the technology is different, everything is different. But there is something that doesn’t change, something that politicians have been using for centuries and centuries, and that’s using fear. It’s like the sign in Monsters, Inc. outside the factory: “We scare because we care.” (laughs) It’s about scaring people so they need a protector, and the protector is going to come embodied in this politician who’s going to protect people from evils like these immigrants. Do we really believe these workers that are going to pick crops of lettuce and tomatoes are going to create terrorist attacks? It’s way more likely that terrorists would cross through the Canadian border. I mean, let’s put it this way: these guys [from Mexico], they’re not terrorists, they’re just guys who cross looking for better opportunity. And trying to go to—hel-loo?—the land of opportunity. What’s scary is that America is slowly, slowly changing its own definition. The concept of democracy is slowly changing its meaning, and we’re accepting it. We’re accepting that democracy comes together with gated communities. It’s the same thing about the concept of America, this beautiful country created by immigrants—this safe haven for people suffering injustice. In terms of ideology, it was the land of opportunity. Now it’s becoming the land of the zealot. I think a lot of that is manipulation of what reality is. Scene: On the subject of manipulation, it seems that more movies are starting to use long, unbroken takes—not just art films, but major-studio releases and action movies. Is this a reaction to digital fakery and strobe-light editing? Cuarón: I don’t see it as [the only] way to do cinema. Cinema is so diverse, and I hope it keeps on being very diverse. The truth of the matter is, when [a style] becomes really boring is when it becomes the formal way of doing things. For me, the danger of fast cutting is that you end up seeing nothing. Fast cutting in a lot of cases is fantastic, properly used—c’mon, Orson Welles knew how to do that. You see Touch of Evil, and he has an opening that is an amazing virtuoso shot, a one-shot deal. And then you see the murder in the hotel room, which is so choppy. But then you have a difficult thing where everything becomes about putting together bits and pieces. It’s not about the moment any more; it’s about putting together bits and pieces for shock value. And it’s the kind of shock value where you can close your eyes and keep following the story. That is the big problem I have with a lot of contemporary cinema: it’s not cinema anymore. It’s illustration of stories. Narrative is one element cinema uses; it shouldn’t be a hostage of narrative. To answer your question, I think audiences are getting tired of all those zillion-billion cuts. It’s the easiest thing you can do as a director: get a lot of cameras, shoot a lot of setups, and send the whole thing to your editor. (laughs) And anyway, you’re going to have a script that’s so dialogue-centered, and the dialogue is so expositional, that you can close your eyes and follow the whole thing. And if you open your eyes, it’s just a lot of little shocks all the time. And together with one of these fast cuts, it comes with a big sound effect. But I think that slowly more interesting ways of doing cinema are getting integrated into the mainstream. Or that’s my hope, at least. Scene: What kind of challenges did a long take like the battlefield scene present? Is there a greater emphasis on rehearsal? Cuarón: Oh yeah. (laughs) In Hollywood time, you have, say, 14 days to shoot your action scene, and in a conventional way, from day one you’re shooting: you start with this bit of the location, and the second unit moves to the second beat while a third unit is maybe doing inserts of explosions. Every day, you have hundreds of bits of footage. Here, Day 12 comes and you haven’t even rolled camera. And everybody starts getting very nervous, everybody starts getting very pissed-off, and you’re losing the location after the 14th day. On the 13th day, you try to shoot it a couple of times, because each time is like a four-hour reset, because of the explosives and blood and so forth. And that 13th day, you cannot do one whole take because something happens. Then Day 14 comes—and seven minutes into it, the camera operator falls down. And then you have one more shot, and that’s when everything comes together. And there you are: you’re back to schedule—no second unit required! (laughs) It’s stressful in that sense. As Clive would say, you don’t want to be the one who blows it.